Welcome to ImperfeCt Contrition!

Nigel Roberts' Substack

In Catholicism, your contrition is perfect when you are sorry for your sins because they offend God. Imperfect contrition, on the other hand, is when you are sorry for your sins because you’re afraid they’ll bite you in the ass—which means perhaps you aren’t always that sorry.

I’m sending you this in the hope that you’ll be interested in reading what I write. If you do decide to follow my Substack, by the way, I won’t be asking you to pay anything—although Substack encourages this*.

I am 73 now, and much of what I’ve seen over my lifetime has disappeared. I was brought up as a child in colonial Nyasaland (now Malawi) and worked in Hong Kong, Thailand and Nepal in jobs that no young westerner would be given these days (a beat reporter in Hong Kong, a teenage teacher in Thailand, a paramedic in Nepal). When I was 30, I was hired by the World Bank and moved to the US, and after that lived and worked for extended periods in Kenya, Nepal (again), Ethiopia, Israel/Palestine, the western Pacific, Somalia and Myanmar.

Since I was born, the world’s population has grown from 2.5 billion to 8.2 billion (UN figures), and average per capita GDP from $3,360 to $16,677 (in constant 2011 prices**)—thus total global wealth has increased by over 16-fold. This is reflected in the multiplication of motorable roads, from some 15-20 million km in 1951 to some 85-90 million km today, an increase of around 500 percent. Roads and the ubiqity of cellphone access have brought an increasingly congested world together in ways that shatter cultures and erode established identities and values. A lot more people are a lot better off, but much has been lost along the way—and it is this, above all, that I plan to write about.

I’ll post on a variety of subjects—people and places I have seen, the books that have helped explain the world to me, colonialism and neo-colonialism, war and battlefields, flying and the history of aviation, my past, my family, guilt, memory…..

I’ll start with several pieces about Nepal.

I aim to post at least once every two weeks.

And I would, of course, very much like to hear back from you.

Finally—my Substack logo. I saw these three entrancing creatures in a passageway at Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, Tibet, in 2017. They are hybrids, and combine predator and prey: an otter and a fish, a makara (sea-dragon) and a conch, a snow lion and a garuda. They are composed of real and mythical animals from all over Asia, brought together through the complex meanderings of the Silk Routes. They are known as the Three Victorious Creatures of Harmony; I’m told they symbolize the reconciliation of irreconcilables—something we could use a lot more of.

Thank you!

Nigel

* Not unless I decide to share a book I’ve written on Nepal on this platform: if I do so, I’ll ask those who survive the first few chapters to contribute if they want to read the rest.

** According to ‘Our World in Data’ in the Maddison Project Database.